Ext3 vs NTFS for sharing USB Hard Drive using Samba under Tomato

I formatted the hard drive as NTFS under Windows 7 before connecting it to the router, and then enabled Samba file sharing.

To my shock, the NTFS-3G driver not only saturated the CPU, but when writing over the network, gave a top file transfer speed of only 1.5MB/s.

I then reformatted the drive as ext3, and this time got much more reasonable file transfer speed of 8MB/s, with a peak CPU usage of 90% - at least some free CPU time was left over!

I am not going as far to say that the NTFS-3G driver is junk, because it does provide Linux users with an option to access files on an NTFS partition, but it should clearly be labelled as crippleware, as the maker Tuxera provides a commercial version with better performance.

At the moment, the NTFS-3G driver is considered the mainstream driver, and its poor performance could lead people to falsely conclude that Linux is inferior.